occasionally bombarding the headquarters in an irregular manner

February 07, 2013

a democratic copper

Here’s a thing: Wang Dengchao, a fairly senior Chinese cop,
seems to have been jailed on bogus public order charges. Dissidents say that
this is the real reason:

Wang
Dengchao (王登朝), a police officer at Luohu Sub-bureau of Shenzhen Public
Security Bureau (police ID 054985), was arrested on March 8, 2012 on charges of embezzlement and
disruption of public services. After being detained for 8 months, he was tried
and sentenced to 14
years in prison on December 4th, 2012.

But
he is believed to be arrested and harshly sentenced for attempting to organize
a large-scale assembly to commemorate the 87th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen’s death,
to be held in Lianhua Hill Park in Shenzhen on March 10th, 2012. Friends and family said Wang
Dengchao had taken out a 500,000 loan from bank for the event. He made T-shirts
and banners, and hired people to distribute flies and other promotional
materials. He also asked friends to give speeches during the assembly. He had
foreseen the possibility of being arrested, but he believed that if the event
was held as planned, it would be worth it.

Turning People’s Republic of China back to the
Republic of China (民国), or the pre-1949 era, has been a
strain in China’s democratic thinking and activism.

Presumably by people who never heard of the Blue Shirts. Anyway, one
interesting point here is that Wang was jailed on criminal charges rather than for
allegations related to subversion. This is unusual because Beijing is usually quite
open about its ‘right’ to jail people on political charges. But then the Party venerates Sun Yatsen as well as a kind of John the Baptist figure so it would be embarrassing to bang someone up for freelancing on the sme thing. His appeal was held
today: no news yet of how it turned out.

Elsewhere, Xi Jinping has called for the Party to be ‘more tolerant of
criticism’. This mainly seems to refer to criticism from the ‘eight democratic parties’
that Beijing keeps as, basically, pets, and patronises from time to time when it
wants to signal a liberal turn. One of these, ironically, is the successor of
the old left-Kuomintang.

Overall, Xi’s comments seem to fit into the emerging overall strategy of
trying to make the walled garden bigger while also raising the size of the
wall. And of course if you jail people on
bogus criminal charges then you can’t be charged with intolerance of dissent.